


Victim of sensory love

by heavenisalibrary



Series: Tumblr Prompt Fills [13]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-21
Updated: 2014-04-21
Packaged: 2018-01-20 06:41:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1500560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavenisalibrary/pseuds/heavenisalibrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The monsters were only outside for so long, honey,” she says over a glass of wine one night, her lips stained red, “by the time I got to Leadworth, they all lived inside of me.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Victim of sensory love

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: a story that involves river telling the doctor about what she remembers of her childhood and how she moved past it. or really any story about river sharing her past with someone in someway.

River’s got a scar behind her left ear from an unfortunate incident with an entirely unnecessary curling iron. It’s at stark odds with the pale ridge of skin that snakes its way just below it, stopping at the side of her jaw and usually hidden by hair left by a rapier wielded against her during training when she was twelve, give or take.

He pieces together her story over the years, bits of horror and mundanity and trauma and romance written onto her skin like a story he gets to read those rare times she sheds her armor and lets him in.

She’s got a scar across her left achilles tendon where someone tried to cut her down and failed, and a patch of discolored skin on the back of her calf from a close call with a blaster. Once she tells him, hiding beneath the duvet late at night like a kid in a blanket fort, that even when she was Mels the Silence would send things to test her — strangers and monsters who would crawl out of alleyways and come at her in dingy bars she shouldn’t have even been in and make sure she was staying in shape. There’s callouses on her fingers that never seem to fade from all the times she pulled a trigger; one of her more tenuous truths that she says with her eyes fixed somewhere over her left shoulder is that most of the time, when she pulled the trigger, she didn’t even care.

There’s a small pucker of skin at her hip where she was run through with some sort of pipe, and when the humidity gets too high she walks a little stiffly, her right knee clogged with scar tissue from an ACL tear that never properly healed. She got that when she was Mels, she tells him, stealing a bus because the Silence told her to — she’d crashed it, and had to crawl out of the wreckage and run away. She’s composed in most situations — she has to be, she says, she learned very young, but sometimes when things got to be too much, her mind would slip on her. The Silence’s constant interference would leave her wondering why exactly she was doing what she was doing, grasping at straws and flickering memories and falling into a panicked sort of quicksand that she couldn’t get out of. She’d been like that when she wrecked her knee.

River tells him that she doesn’t get like that, anymore. He kisses her temple and wonders how much she even remembers of her life before Berlin. One night he notices the nearly invisible scar on the back of her shoulder, and when she tells him a long, winding story about an android and a taster that makes almost no sense, he realizes that she probably made things up to explain marks on her skin the next morning she couldn’t remember and since forgotten what was real and what wasn’t.

But she wakes up so many nights, when she’s younger, screaming, and loud noises make her go for her blaster and crowds make her tense up like a jungle cat and sometimes when they make love he sees her fingers flex against the skin of his throat as she runs them along his neck and he knows that’s the horror parts of her — he knows that even if she invented some stories, the real ones are worse. 

She admits, though, that there were parts of it she liked — she says she liked the structure when she was younger. The strict diets and exercise regimens and breakneck-paced academic supplements put her on the sort of constant overload she enjoys, but as she tells him more, he realizes she only learned things that helped the Silence further their cause. They’d educated her as a weapon, as a tool, not as a child. She tells him that she didn’t learn to read until she was ten or so. He hates the thought of River being so young and alone and stretched thin, not even able to tell herself a bedtime story to fall asleep.

 

When he tells her as much, she laughs, but he can see that her eyes are tight and guarded.

 

“The monsters were only outside for so long, honey,” she says over a glass of wine one night, her lips stained red, “by the time I got to Leadworth, they all lived inside of me.”

There’s a scar along her spine from a surgery she had when she was Mels after an injury even her Time Lord constitution wouldn’t heal left her hospitalized. She tells him she got a week off following that surgery — a week of being a real girl, of waking up and going to school and spending time with her friends and going home and repeating. She tells him Amy and Rory had been elated that she went a week without a brush with the authorities, and he can tell by the tightness of her face how much it hurt her that she had to disappoint them immediately following.

He asks her about the things they asked her to do as Mels, even though he doesn’t want to know the answers. She tells him it was mostly training — things to keep her mind and body sharp. A lot of strategy — thievery and cons of all sorts — and a lot of brutality — fights with strangers, demons, monsters they sent to test her. She says that once a gorilla-of-a-man asked her for directions when she was walking him late at night, but when she’d started to respond, he’d shoved her against a wall and she’d stabbed him without a thought — she looks at her hands as she speaks, as though she can still see the blood, even as she tells him that Mels didn’t care.

“Mels killed a lot of people,” she says, “I killed a lot of people. I was very good at it. I even killed you.”

“I remember,” he says.

Once, when she’s very young and her smiles are all teeth, he wraps his arms around her from behind and she nearly snaps him in half — it’s so quick, so thoughtless, and the Doctor realized in that moment that it wasn’t River’s programming that he had to fear. It was her trauma. It was the screaming nightmares she didn’t want him to see, the way she couldn’t go out without a weapon, the way she habitually left his kitchen knives around the rooms of the TARDIS, thoughtlessly carrying them with her where she went, as though the monsters really did live inside of her; she wasn’t scared, she told him when he brought it up one night. She says that she’s seldom ever scared — she says having lived the life she has, one’s ability to be scared fades away pretty quickly. She says she’s paranoid, and she’s a creature of habit, and she’s getting better with time but can we please not talk about this now, sweetie, I’d rather do just about anything else, so he kisses her quiet and calm, acknowledging her scars with the gentle brush of his fingers. When he tries to kiss them better, she runs her fingers through his hair, pulling it gently so that he looks at her, and she laughs softly.

"They’re scars, sweetie," she says, "they don’t hurt anymore. But you can’t kiss them better."


End file.
